The Big Sleep

⚖The case for it

Philip Marlowe's first case set the gold standard for the noir detective novel. Chandler's Los Angeles seethes with corruption, wealth masking rot, sexual menace. The plot is famously labyrinthine (even Chandler couldn't say who killed the chauffeur), but that hardly matters. What counts is the voice, the city, the moral clarity of a man who "is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

— the canon

✕The case against

Stitched together from two earlier pulp stories, the plot never resolves; the famous unanswerable question about the chauffeur's killer is real, and not the only loose thread. The period bigotry is harder to wave off: Geiger's homosexuality registers as moral disease, and Carmen exists to be leered at, then loathed. Some of the similes have curdled into self-parody.

— the honest librarian